Jorge Cortell

My blog in English

Flight data as business intelligence

As an international “solo-preneur” you have to be careful about how to invest your time and resources, and what metrics are really key.

My main company (Kanteron Systems) is in the Enterprise Healthcare Software world. Blog posts and books talking about apps, user adoption, and monetization mean nothing to me. Yet most companies in the Enterprise B2B space are big listed multinationals, so their metrics do not exactly apply to me either.

So, apart from the obvious (revenue, cash flow, profits, etc), what other data do I take into account to make my decisions? The most unusual one is flights.

Last time I checked, I noticed I have visited 171 cities

For example, in 2012 I was based in New York (although my company’s HQ are in Valencia – Spain), getting our US subsidiary off the ground, and growing my network in the East Coast of the USA, so I flew very little. 25 flights – 40503 miles to be exact:

But in 2013 sales opportunities started to ramp up in Latin America, so I had to fly there often. In total that year I flew 41 flights – 67 750 miles:

2014 was the year of the introduction of our pioneer and “disruptively innovative” (any more buzz words?) solution, and I took 71 flights, traveling 121704 miles to meet with all kinds of potential customers worldwide:

But in 2015 I spent a lot of time focusing in the European market. So much so that we decided to open a UK subsidiary and I moved with my wife and my son to London, thus reducing the need to cross the pond every other week, limiting my flights to 35 – 65517 miles:

As you can see, all those flights obviously correlate with the location of our customer base: